Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/68

Rh sometime be. The execution of the plan, the voluntary act of one charged with the fulfilment of the idea, involves a process whereby one can come truthfully to say: “The fact is accomplished: the plan is no longer a mere plan: that which was the object of the plan once was not, but now it is. The ‘mere idea’ has turned into reality.”

All these are familiar distinctions of common sense. Our language is thus indeed full of expressions founded upon the contrast between what is and what is not. Our task is to make a beginning at grasping the precise sense of this contrast. And here you may already permit me a brief excursion into the realm of more technical language.

For the next remark which our study of even our popular vocabulary here suggests has already been implied in the foregoing words. Whatever the contrast between being and non-being ultimately involves, we all observe that we express the existence or reality of an object by saying that it is, while when we tell merely what a given object is, we do not, in so far, appear to throw any light upon the truth of the assertion that the object in question is real. Thus I can tell you what a fairy is; but in so far I do not yet tell you whether a fairy is in any given sense real or unreal. Now the distinction thus expressed is very naturally stated, in a familiar technical phrase, by calling it, as many metaphysicians do, the difference between the that and the what, or between the existence and the essence of a fairy. In this phraseology of the philosophers, the that refers to the assertion of the ontological predicate itself. The what, also sometimes called the essence, refers to the ideal description of the object